Windows.. it's like coming home! 3396

Most of these folks came around in the end, though.

You're focusing on internals. These folks, for the most part, where focusing on user interface, where OS 9 was still clearly ahead of the compebreastion.

There's a bit of slight of hand going on there, though. Very little of the consumer market, I think, cares about frame rates for high-end 3D games, Apple's stuff can serve the rest of that market just fine.

Also, I think games have become less important as we've moved more from a one computer per family model to a one computer per person model. I know the demographics are slowly changing as the kids who grew up with electronic gaming are getting older, but for the moment games are still mostly played by a fairly young crowd, and now that everyone gets their own computer, the parents don't have to take the kids' gaming demands into account when buying their own machines.

It is a very small segment, but it's also, I think, an influential one.

And I don't think it's just open source types either. There are a fair number of people out there who have *nix experience or need something the field of web development) but want a decent desktop environment.

As someone who occasionally purchases products for education from Apple on behalf of clients (and is, in fact, doing so right now), I strongly disagree. Yes, you can get $300 minitowers from Dell, but these are really not what you want in a lab. Space costs more than computers do; you really want small-form factor machines.

Take a look at this Dell:

OptiPlex GX520 (Small Form Factor) Intel Celeron D Processor 331 2.66GHz,256K,533MHz FSB 512MB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM Dell 17 inch E177FP Flat Panel, Analog 80GB SATA Hard Drive 24X CDRW-DVD Combo GMA950 Graphics Int Broadcom GbNIC

$957

The equivalent iMac is $899 (Apple will give them to the client for $810 right now, actually), and has a nicer screen (it's digital), a better software bundle, a better processor, a better form factor, and can run both OS X and Windows, so I don't need to buy different machines to support both platforms. (I suspect Apple released BootCamp in large part for the education market, actually.)

Plus, Apple has a rep on campus on a regular basis, provides free support for large installs (within reason), has better server OS pricing that Microsoft, and deals out fairly valuable free stuff on a fairly regular basis (like copies of Final Cut Pro).

And I think you're wrong. Most people will continue to buy Windows machines because "that's what everyone uses", but Apple's offerings meet the needs of most consumers just fine.

snip

Previous attempts, though, had yielded products with performance (as a percentage of native performance) in the single digits, though. Or maybe the teens. That's not just bad, it's basically useless. I can't really see Apple just buttuming that they'd be able to magically fix that problem.

But he *did* do it before the public announcement.

Yes, but Cell-based machines probably would have been a *really* extreme version of this. Like, 50% slower for most stuff, 800% faster for stuff that could really benefit.

Microsoft is supporting Intel with the next major release, I believe. This is not a particularly unreasonable thing to do, particularly since 99% of users don't do anything CPU-intensive in Office, and so are fine with in in Rosetta. (This isn't like Clbuttic on OS X, where the user experience is terrible for non-native apps, after all. For most regular desktop apps, the only noticeable difference running them in Rosetta is that they take longer to launch.)

-- "Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." -- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005